A World of Questions & Answers—Part I

Making History

Introduction

This week’s post is the first instalment of a multi-part article—a sequel to last week’s article on Collingwood’s encounter with “the Sphinx of Kensington Gardens” and his resulting epiphany:  an epistemology and logic of question-and-answer complexes, one quite at odds with the still prevailing epistemology and widespread misconceptions of the nature of truth.

In the present series, we continue our discussion of the ideas explored last time, developing the theme to show some of the further practical implications for change, business, society, and everyday life.  

Along the way we hope to throw light on an alternative way of understanding the world around us, and the things people try and say about it.

—The Editors

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A World of Questions & Answers—Part I:  Making History

From a Carpenter’s Bag

At the time of his twice-daily rumination in Kensington Gardens on the riddle posed by his personal Sphinx, the 27-year-old Oxford philosophy don Robin G. Collingwood (elected a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford while still an undergraduate), was already also an experienced archaeologist, following in the footsteps of his father, William “Gershom” Collingwood, an archaeologist, antiquary, artist, writer and historian. 

Gershom, who had acted as Ruskin’s private secretary when his son Robin was growing up and was later Ruskin’s biographer, may have been a struggling artist, but he was a gifted and accomplished archaeologist—his true calling, increasingly occupying his time as he got older. And so it was that the young Robin Collingwood grew up “in a gradually thickening archaeological atmosphere.”¹ 

He had accompanied his parents Gershom and Dorrie on his very first dig when he was only three weeks old, for Gershom was then leading an excavation at Mediobogdum, a Roman fort in Cumbria, and his parents brought him along in a carpenter’s bag.²  He continued to spend his summers on major digs throughout his childhood and during the long summer vacations from Rugby (nine weeks) and Oxford (sixteen weeks), every year up to the outbreak of war, and he served on the staff of large excavations from an early age.

By the time he was 23 or 24 Collingwood was leading large archaeological excavations of his own,³ and for this hugely responsible task, requiring a prodigious amount of knowledge, he was well prepared.

All of Gershom and Dorrie’s children were home-schooled. Thanks to his father’s tutelage and his own natural gifts and thirst for knowledge, even by the time he was put into prep school for a year at age 13 to enable him to compete for a scholarship to boarding school, Collingwood was already a serious scholar.  

He was by then almost equally fluent in French, German and English, while fast approaching fluency in both Latin (which he had begun studying at the age of 4) and Greek (which he didn’t start studying seriously until the ripe old age of 6)—all of which, he tells us in his Autobiography, was “my father’s doing.”  

But it was, he emphasizes, purely his “own doing” that from around the same tender kindergarten age he had begun exploring his father’s library, and started “to read everything I could find about the natural sciences, especially geology, astronomy, and physics; to recognize rocks, to know the stars, and to understand the working of pumps and locks and other mechanical appliances up and down the house.”⁴

At age eight he made his way sedulously through Abbott’s translation of Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals), which the little lad, like most undergraduates upon first reading Kant, found to his chagrin was made up of perfectly grammatical sentences stringing together words he knew, but whose meaning nonetheless baffled him. “I was attacked by a strange succession of emotions. First came an intense excitement. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand.”

And then he felt that “the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own,”⁵  Finally, it was then and there that he felt his destiny had been revealed to him, that thinking would be the task that would occupy his life, and from then on he began to spend long hours each day lost in thought while playing with paper men.⁶  

His father taught him ancient and modern history, and while history fascinated him above all, and while historical studies of the ancient world and reports of archaeological excavations occupied the greater part of his leisure time throughout his student years (as well as during times at Rugby when he was meant to be studying other subjects), it was at the age of nine that Collingwood embarked on what he considered to be “my own subject”—running throughout all his later life’s work in philosophy, history and archaeology:  “the history of thought.” 

For it was at a friend’s house that the youngster chanced upon a battered 17^th Century book, without cover or title page, “full of strange doctrines about meteorology and geology and planetary motions,” a book he later recognized to have been Descartes’s 1644 Principia Philosophiae, with its telltale mathematics including the mechanics of vortices. But the nine-year-old “already knew enough about the corresponding modern theories to appreciate the contrast which it offered.”⁷

It let me into the secret which modern books had been keeping from me, that the natural sciences have a history of their own, and that the doctrines they teach on any given subject, at any given time, have been reached not by some discoverer penetrating to the truth after ages of error, but by the gradual modification of doctrines previously held; and will at some future date, unless thinking stops, be themselves no less modified.

He goes on to add,

I will not say that all this became clear to me at that childish age; but at least I became aware from reading this old book that science is less like a hoard of truths, ascertained piecemeal, than an organism which in the course of its history undergoes more or less continuous alteration in every part.⁸

And so it was, that by the time the young intelligence officer at the Admiralty solved the riddle of the Albert Memorial to his own satisfaction, he was not only a seasoned Oxford philosopher and gifted teacher of philosophy.  He was an experienced historian and archaeologist, leader of major excavations of Roman ruins, personally trained by Francis Haverfield—the eminent Oxford historian and archaeologist of Roman Britain (himself once a protégé of Mommsen⁹)—as well as being an historian of ideas with a deep understanding of historiography and of the history and philosophy of science. 

Digging Deeper

It was not only as an Oxford philosopher, then, but as a practicing scientist, steeped in the scientific approach to investigating archaeological sites hands-on, that Collingwood found himself annoyed (an annoyance I myself share for much the same reasons) by philosophers of science who are themselves neither practicing scientists nor scientifically trained, pontificating, often rather fancifully, about what it is that scientists actually do, and especially what it is that they are trying to do.¹⁰ 

And as an historian and archaeologist Collingwood considered himself very much a scientist above all.

He distinguished clearly between the methods of the natural sciences on the one hand, concerned with whatever is universal, seeking general laws, and the methods of history and archaeology on the other, concerned rather with the particular, and seeking a scientific understanding of something individual, something unique, such as the details of a particular historical event or the daily life of a lost city that was long ago buried in the form of chronologically stratified layers of potsherds, bits of metal and broken stones.  

And while in Collingwood’s voluminous writings on historical method and historiography he had no truck with most of the approaches to historical work associated with the phrase “scientific history,” particularly of the kind seeking general laws and attempting to ape the natural sciences, throughout his life and work he was in no doubt whatsoever that history in general, epitomized in many ways by archaeology in particular, was every bit as much a science as physics or chemistry.  

Historical inference was for Collingwood the very core of historical understanding, and was a quintessentially scientific pursuit in a truly Baconian spirit—in every respect true to the foundational principles of modern science first set out in Bacon’s Novum Organum of 1620.

In his Autobiography, he tells of his experience as an historian of Roman Britain when on an archaeological dig, well before his ever grappling with the riddle of Scott’s sphinx:

Experience soon taught me that under these laboratory conditions one found out nothing at all except in answer to a question; and not a vague question either, but a definite one. That when one dug saying merely, ‘Let us see what there is here’, one learnt nothing, except casually in so far as casual questions arose in one’s mind while digging: ‘Is that black stuff peat or occupation-soil? Is that a potsherd under your foot? Are those loose stones a ruined wall?’  That what one learnt depended not merely on what turned up in one’s trenches but also on what questions one was asking: so that a man who was asking questions of one kind learnt one kind of thing from a piece of digging which to another man revealed something different, to a third something illusory, and to a fourth nothing at all.

Here I was only rediscovering for myself, in the practice of historical research, principles which Bacon and Descartes had stated, three hundred years earlier, in connexion with the natural sciences. Each of them had said very plainly that knowledge comes only by answering questions, and that these questions must be the right questions and asked in the right order. And I had often read the works in which they said it; but I did not understand them until I had found the same thing out for myself.¹¹

Like the papier-mâché relief maps he and his father Gershom made by boiling down newspapers in a saucepan so that his father could illustrate historical battles and other events when teaching him ancient and modern history, all historical research, for Collingwood, not just archaeology, was a matter of making again, in as detailed a model as was inferentially justified by the evidence, what had actually been there in the past.  

The science of history was about inference from evidence with the aim of reconstruction. The historian is making a kind of scale model, a replica—a history—of what had been made before by men and women, and above all it is about thinking all over again what those very men and women so long ago were themselves actually thinking.

As Collingwood never tired of emphasizing, this was not at all a matter of relying on the authority of earlier historical accounts—far from it—or even relying on the contemporaneous testimony of those who were there, testimony which is as likely as not to have been erroneous, disingenuous or at least tendentious. 

Historical research was about inference from indisputable evidence. And even contemporary witnesses, let alone the narratives of earlier historians—Tacitus or Herodotus or Thucydides—were merely looking on from the outside. 

Whereas what interested Collingwood, and the whole point for him, was ultimately to understand the minds of those who built those cities, who took the actions they took, who fought those battles, not just where and when, or even how, but why they chose to do what they did, such that from their own vantage point and from their own point of view nothing else would have made sense at the time. 

And this is a matter of skilfully deploying the question-and-answer logic which we discussed last week, and of rigorous inference from the evidence; and it involves, above all, critical thinking, critical even regarding what can or cannot be taken as being evidence.

We know that truth is to be had, not by swallowing what our authorities tell us, but by criticizing it; and thus the supposedly fixed points between which the historical imagination spins its web are not given to us ready made, they must be achieved by critical thinking.

There is nothing other than historical thought itself, by appeal to which its conclusions may be verified. The hero of a detective novel is thinking exactly like an historian when, from indications of the most varied kinds, he constructs an imaginary picture of how a crime was committed, and by whom. At first, this is a mere theory, awaiting verification, which must come to it from without. Happily for the detective, the conventions of that literary form dictate that when his construction is complete it shall be neatly pegged down by a confession from the criminal, given in such circumstances that its genuineness is beyond question. The historian is less fortunate. If, after convincing himself by a study of the evidence already available that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare or that Henry VII murdered the Princes in the Tower, he were to find an autograph document confessing the fact, he would by no means have verified his conclusions; the new document, so far from closing the inquiry, would only have complicated it by raising a new problem, the problem of its own authenticity.¹²

The comparison with detective work Collingwood would go on to develop further at great length, a topic to which we shall return in a later instalment. But this forensic, scientific approach to historical research could not have been further removed from the kind of history Collingwood dismissed and derided throughout his writings as “scissors-and-paste” history, which “consists in excerpting the required material from writers whose work cannot be checked…because the eyewitnesses who co-operated in that work are no longer alive.”

“As a method,” he says, “this is far inferior to the Socratic method of the fifth century.”¹³ The method of question and answer.

Thinking Again

The people who made history, not a Tacitus or a Thucydides or a Herodotus but a Henry VIII or a Wellington at Waterloo or a Nelson at Trafalgar, what were they thinking?  What did they think they were doing from their own point of view?  For Collingwood, “‘All history is the history of thought’.  You are thinking historically…when you say about anything, ‘I see what the person who made this (wrote this, used this, designed this, &c.) was thinking’. Until you can say that, you may be trying to think historically but you are not succeeding. And there is nothing else except thought that can be the object of historical knowledge.”¹⁴

What’s more, in the making of an historical account, “the historian of a certain thought must think for himself that very same thought, not another like it.”¹⁵  …“If someone has written that twice two is four, and if some one else, …the historian, wants to knows what he was thinking when he made those marks on paper,” and how to interpret those marks, the historian must be “thinking simultaneously…that twice two are four,” and that the maker of those marks on paper “thought this too,” and “that he expressed this thought by making those marks on paper.”¹⁶  Hence Collingwood’s principle that “historical knowledge is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying.” 

The people who made history, what were they thinking, what did they think they were doing, and why, from their own point of view?  To answer this is the task of the historian, but not only of the historian—it is the basis for any genuinely scientific approach to understanding human conduct.

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© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted

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1. An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 80

2. ibid.

3. ibid., pp. 23-4

4. ibid., p. 1

5. ibid., p. 5

6. ibid., pp. 4-5

7. ibid.

8. ibid., pp. 1-2

9. The legendary German archaeologist, historian and classical scholar Theodor Mommsen (1817– 1903), an enduring authority on Roman history, was one of the most outstanding classicists of the age, who in 1902 was made a Nobel Laureate in Literature as “the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome.” The already legendary Mommsen had admired the archaeological work of the 27-year old Haverfield, then an unknown village schoolmaster, catapulting him to stardom. Thanks to Mommsen’s having discovered him and plucked him from obscurity, Haverfield was to become the doyen of Oxford archaeology, which for a time dominated the scientific study of Roman Britain, perhaps thanks above all to Haverfield’s influence. Haverfield was a major influence on Collingwood, despite many significant differences in their views.

10. It can often be the same problem from the opposite direction when scientists pontificate about what science is all about without a philosophical training.

11. ibid. pp. 24-25

12. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1946, P. 243

13. ibid., p. 33

14. An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 110

15. ibid., p. 111

16. ibid.